The Sorrow of War

Kien fights with the 27th Battalion and survives a massacre so total that the site becomes known among soldiers as the Jungle of Screaming Souls, the wind through the trees remembered as the voices of the dead. Bảo Ninh refuses the chronological war novel almost entirely: combat, Kien's postwar wandering through Hanoi, and his prewar romance with Phương all interrupt each other mid-scene, because the book's real subject is what trauma does to time, not what happened in what order. A reader has to reconstruct Kien's war the way Kien does, in pieces that never quite reassemble into a story with a moral.

Phương is introduced as Kien's first love, luminous and reckless, and the war reaches her before it reaches him: assaulted on a train south while Kien, restrained by other passengers during an air raid, cannot stop it. Kien spends the rest of the book unable to separate his love for her from that failure, and Bảo Ninh is careful not to let Phương become simply his wound; she survives the war on her own terms, drifting through relationships Kien reads as betrayal, refusing to be the untouched girl he needs back.

Bảo Ninh served in the same 27th Battalion the novel maims almost to a man. When the book first appeared in Hanoi in 1990 it was titled Thân Phận Của Tình Yêu, The Fate of Love, a softer title chosen to help it clear censors still committed to a literature of victory rather than mourning; it won the Vietnam Writers' Association prize that year almost by surprise, before officials began quietly restricting it for describing the war's cost without redemption. Translated into English in 1993 as The Sorrow of War, and elsewhere as The Jungle of Screaming Souls, it became the first Vietnamese novel to reach a wide Western readership, arriving just as Western readers were reassessing their own war fiction, part of why it read, outside Vietnam, as the war's missing other half.